Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with Diabetes. Diabetes mellitus is a chronic disease characterized by multiple metabolic abnormalities resulting in impaired management of glucose. According to the recent statistics, diabetes is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. Diabetic patients are also at significantly higher risk to develop complications which severely influence life quality of the patients.
A hallmark of Diabetes is high level of blood glucose caused by the lack of insulin production, insulin resistance in peripheral tissues, or both, and generally classified into two types, insulin-dependent (type 1) and non-insulin-dependent (type 2). Type 1 diabetes is found to be connected with the loss of pancreatic beta-cells which secretes insulin upon feeding. Despite tremendous progress in understanding the basis of diabetes, it still remains unclear which factors are involved in the development of the disease and govern the response to therapeutic intervention. This highlights the need of monitoring the pancreatic beta-cells in body since it will help us to comprehend the development of the disease and the effectiveness of therapeutic treatments.
With recent rapid innovations, molecular imaging is gaining significant attention in the basic biomedical sciences and in clinical research and practice. Indeed, non-invasive imaging techniques are revolutionizing the understanding of diseases at the cellular and molecular levels. However, the conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) have difficulties to visualize small and soft organs like pancreas, especially the beta-cells.